The Christian Old Testament Canon

• St. Jerome did not understand that the Jewish canon haphazard selection process and tried to persuade the Church to drop the Apocrypha.
• There was no authoritative list since the beginning of Christendom on the extant of the canon. In fact there were many lists and many canons.
• The current situation is no better. The Catholic, the Orthodox and the Protestant churches all disagree as to what constitute the Old Testament canon.
• Looking inward into the New Testament (a favourite method among fundamentalist of establishing OT canonicty) does not help, for Jude include two references to non-canonical books, threating them as though he was quoting from scripture. We find a similar reference in the epistle to the Hebrews. Now if "inspired" books refered to non-canonical books as "inspired": what gives?

The Evolution of the Canon

• The earliest Christian list of Old Testament books was that of Melito, Bishop of Sardis, around AD170. His list parallels the Hebrew canon but lacked the books of Esther and Lamentations.
• From this time onwards the lists of the Church Fathers included the apocrypha. From some ancient Christian Greek manuscripts of the Bible we have today, we can see that up to the fourth century, there was still no agreement as to the complete list of canonical books.
  • The Codex Vaticanus, a fourth century manuscript, includes all the apocrypha except the books of Maccabees.
  • The Codex Sinaiticus, another fourth century manuscript, adds Tobit, Judith and I & II Maccabees to the Hebrew canon.
  • The Codex Alexandrinus, a fifth century manuscripts adds the apocrypha, the Wisdom of Solomon, the Psalms of Solomon, and III & IV Maccabees. [2]

• During the Reformation, the Protestant leaders refused to accept the apocrypha as inspired works. Martin Luther (1483-1546) did, however, included the apocrypha in the appendix of his German translation of the Bible. The Protestant Churches essentially hold Luther's view on the OT Canon.
• The Anglican Church views the books of the apocrypha, not as inspired works, but as "example of life and instruction of manners, but not used to establish doctrine".
• The Roman Catholic Church in the Council of Trent (1548) accepted as inspired eleven of the fourteen books of the apocrypha. It excluded I & II Esdras and the Prayer of Manasses of the apocrypha from the list of canonical books. This decision was reiterated in the First Vatican Council in 1870. Thus the Roman Catholic Old Testament has eleven more books that the Protestant one. [a]
• The Eastern Orthodox Churches accepted Tobit, Judith, Ecclesiasticus and the Wisdom of Solomon as canonical in the synod at Jerusalem in 1672. Today, the canon of the Eastern Orthodox churches all the books in the Roman Catholic Old Testament and on top of these also includes I Esdras, III Maccabees and the Letter of Jeremiah.
• The Ethiopian Church has the largest canon of all. Apart from all the books included in the canon of the Eastern Othrodox Churches added I Enoch, Jubilees and Josippon's Medieval History.[3]

NT References to Non-Canonical Texts

Jude 14-15 It was of these also that Enoch in the seventh generation from Adam prophesied, saying, "Behold, the Lord came with his holy myriads, to execute judgement on all, and to convict all the ungodly of all their deeds of ungodliness which they have committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things which ungodly sinners have spoken against him"

This is a direct quotation from I Enoch 1:9.

In Jude verse 9, we see another reference to a non-canonical book that is outside the apocrypha: The Assumption of Moses.

Jude 9 But when the archangel Michael contended with the devil and disputed the body of Moses, he did not dare to bring a condemnation of slander against him but said "The Lord rebuke you!"

Note that Jude wrote as though the verses were authoritative, he did not question the fact the Enoch prophecies may be false or that the event regarding the archangel fighting the devil may be fiction. He mention them as fact, the way a fundamentalist Christian would do today quoting from the Bible.

In another New Testament book, the epistle to the Hebrews (11:37) quotes a passage from another book , The Martyrdom of Isaiah, that is outside the Christian canon. [4]

The obvious lack of agreement between the various Christian churches, and indeed among the early Christians, as to which books were written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and are thus canonical, shows that there is no clear cut definition of what constitute sacred scripture.

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Notes

References

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